V7M

[norman at nose.cita.utoronto.ca]

While poking around in the documentation for the PUPS archive, I noticed
that V7M is there, but that Warren's note about it says `I have no other
information about who created these changes.'  I believe it was the
Telecommunication Industries Group in Digital, who did the work to make
it easier to sell newer PDP-11 hardware to parts of the Bell System that
used UNIX but didn't want to do their own kernel hacking.  (Actually I
suspect they also did it because the work was interesting and fun, and
because there was a somewhat larger community to whom it would be useful;
but the Bell System connection justified it to management.)

The changes that turned V7 into V7M were given away to anyone that had an
appropriate license from AT&T; Digital didn't charge for them, nor was
there any additional license.  V7M was used as the base for what was
eventually called Ultrix, Digital's own name-brand UNIX, but that product
didn't appear for several years after.

I believe Bill Munson was the manager in charge of TIG at the time;
certainly he was an early management-level champion of UNIX within Digital.
Armando Stettner was probably the most famous of the other folks in the
group, though by no means the only one.

All this is vague stuff for me, since it happened a little before I got
involved in UNIX, and I never ran V7M.  I expect there are others out
there who know more; please chime in!

Norman Wilson